


A Special Limited-Time Offer

by russian_blue



Category: Tough Guide to Fantasyland - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Other, Reference to Many Nasty Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:06:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the adventure you've been waiting for!</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Special Limited-Time Offer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greenlily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/gifts).



Dear Valued Customer,

As someone who previously took part in one or more of our Fantasyland ToursTM, we have a special offer for you, that we think you're going to love.

How can we be so sure of that? Because we read your Customer Feedback Card, and took its comments to heart. We know you were less than completely pleased by your previous Tour(s), and we want a chance to win your loyalty back. We are therefore delighted to offer you a chance to embark on a Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour, available now only to our most valued customers.

What sets this Tour apart from our usual fare? We're glad you asked!

1) _Less magic._ We've heard your complaints, and taken them to heart. We know you're tired of all-knowing (but only occasionally-helping) Wizard Mentors, inborn mystical talents that require no training to use, and magic items stuffed beneath every rock, loose floorboard, leathery-winged avian corpse, and dragon from one end of Fantasyland to the other.

Our Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour is ideal for the kind of Tourist who wants to slug it out the hard way. Experience the thrill of discovering your opponent's weakness -- _without_ the assistance of conveniently-timed prophetic visions! Prove your manliness in combat by defeating your opponents -- with a _non-sentient sword!_ Delight in spending three weeks fighting off a debilitating infection -- _all without magical healing!_

Only the strongest, most competitive of Tourists are up to the challenges of the Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour. We want _you_ , valued customer, to be the first.

2) _More grit._ We aren't talking about your run-of-the-mill, innocuous squalor here. No, we mean _real_ dirt, _real_ disease, _real_ amorality and cynicism. This is a Fantasyland Tour you could polish marble with.

You're a tough one, valued customer, and we know you don't need us to shelter you from the harsh realities of life. That's why we've spent three years designing a Tour that will never once expose you to a moment of kindness, beauty, or comfort, from your first step out of prison (no Starting Points in friendly taverns or bucolic villages here!) to your final, pyrrhic victory against a villain only marginally worse than you are.

Leave the basic Fantasyland Tours to the amateurs and dilettantes. Embark on the adventure of your life with the Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour!

3) _Less humour._ Let's face the facts: it's hard to feel properly rugged and gritty when one of your companions is constantly making jokes, or events encourage you to reflect upon the absurdity of your actions.

That's why, in our Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour, we're giving you the opportunity to soldier through without the benefit of laughter or even companions. You heard me right -- for most of your Tour, you will trudge onward in weary solitude, basking in the fabulous glow of your own grim, joyless determination. Depending on the options you choose in our Custom Itinerary Questionnaire, you may even complete your first brochure without ever once encountering the other Tourists whose story is supposedly a part of your own! It's perfect for the antisocial anti-hero. In short, valued customer, it's perfect for _you_.

4) _More rape and torture._ Because nothing says "serious business" like gratuitous, pointless violence.

You may have experienced torture during a previous brochure. We guarantee, you've never experienced _this_. (Or if you did, we blanked your memory about it afterward, as per the standard Fantasyland Tour liability requirements.) The torture we've arranged for our Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour isn't a bit of fun enjoyed every Friday night at your local BDSM club; it's the real deal, guaranteed to leave you scarred in body and spirit, twisted and broken, but all the more committed to the annihilation of your enemies. And we guarantee you'll have plenty of those, after the ones you trust violate and murder the woman you love (who will have been introduced to your Tour for that purpose a short while in advance).

Are you female, and feeling left out? Don't be! Careful research and focus-testing has produced the most effective, most reliable method of producing sociopathic heroines yet discovered in Fantasyland. Our process has a success rate of more than three percent! Once you've been subjected to our finely-tuned atrocities, you stand a real (if small) chance of emerging as a ruthless harbinger of destruction, hell-bent on nothing more than obliterating the men responsible for your suffering.

5) _Guaranteed non-consolatory ending._ No one will sail off into the West at the end of _your_ adventure. Instead the smoke of their burning ships will stain the sunset bloody red, while you leave behind the wreckage of your homeland and the body of your _one true friend_ OMT to seek the oblivion of solitude, secure in the knowledge that at least you weren't as bad as the other guy. Maybe. On a good day.

  


So if you're tired of fantasies populated by Good Kings, Talented Girls, and Little People who for some reason have a better life than you do, our Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour is _exactly_ the experience for you. All our Kings are proof that monarchy is inevitably an unmitigated evil, all our Girls are there only to serve as sex objects and/or killing machines, and our only Little People were made that way through accidents of childbirth, which have rendered them bitter and angry at everybody taller than them, which is to say the entire world. You'll have no faith in humanity at all by the time you complete even one brochure of our series (available in lengths ranging from a single adventure, through the standard three-brochure package, to the extra-special Endless Epic option that will go on until you get bored or we go out of business).

Heard enough? You can sign up today! Just complete the enclosed Custom Itinerary Questionnaire, and initial each page of the Physical, Emotional, Psychological, Spiritual, and Miscellaneous Harm Liability Waiver, which absolves us of all responsibility for what might happen to you during your Tour. Don't forget to sign at the bottom of page eighty-one! Then mail the lot back to us, and we'll schedule you for the inaugural Special Edition Low Fantasy Tour.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, valued customer. Don't miss out. Be a part of the new wave in Fantasyland today!

  


The Management

**Author's Note:**

> Because really, the backlash against Tolkien and his imitators needs its own bit of mocking.


End file.
